Personas are a great tool. IMO - By the time you arrived these had transformed into bad shorthand. (I say this having been in Devdiv through those years.)

Elvis is not a persona - it is an inside baseball argument to management. It suffered a form of Goodhart’s law … it is a useful tool so people phrase their arguments in that form to win a biz fight and then the tool degrades.

Alan Cooper, who created VB advocated personas. When used well they are great.

The most important insight is your own PoV may be flawed. The way a scientist provides value via software is different than how a firmware developer provides value.

https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672316...